An Open-Source BIOS For ATI GPUs?

Oliver McFadden, the developer behind the Revenge reverse-engineering utility for ATI Radeon GPUs, is hoping to create a free software (GPL licensed) Video BIOS for at least one ATI Radeon graphics card. This is certainly a much larger project than just reverse engineering a driver and is much more risky, but at the same time is very interesting and holds merit. Mark Shuttleworth would also like to see everything down to the device's firmware being free software. The steps Oliver is taking at this point is to examine the AtomBIOS parser, which is open-source as part of the RadeonHD driver (a partial explanation of AtomBIOS). If this open-source BIOS for ATI Radeon GPUs manages to take shape, we'll be sure to cover it here at Phoronix. More information is available on Oliver's blog.